Music Discovery Service/CoverArt finder/etc.

DaddyTorgo · 10-10-2010, 03:48 PM

So my parents got me one of the new lil Nano's for my birthday. Yay for that, although it pushes me out of the "I own nothing at all Apple" camp I suppose.

Anyways, on to the point - I've known for a while now that my music collection is sort of a hodge-podge. Some things are tagged nicely and some are just absolutely not. And I have a ton of albums missing album art that itunes won't find automatically.

Do people recommend just doing it all by hand, or should I just buy one of those programs that uses Gracenote and does it all? I did that with my last MP3 player for free and it worked okay...but not great. Now I want to have something that works good.

I downloaded the demo for TuneUp, and I guess that's how it does it. Does that program work? Any other suggestions? I could do it all by hand, but that seems VERY time consuming.

Mota · 10-10-2010, 07:08 PM

I use MP3Tag to edit a lot of the files. The #1 priority is to have your files tagged properly, otherwise nothing else will work. You still have to find cover art if iTunes can't find it (it does find quite a bit of the commercial stuff).

For anything that doesn't get populated automatically after you've tagged it properly, go to wikipedia, find the album you're looking for and "save image as" to your hard drive and then copy it as your cover art. I've found almost every missing cover that way.

Mota · 10-10-2010, 07:09 PM

And yes it sucks, when I had to rebuild my library after a major crash I think I spent a full week ripping CD's, tagging and adding artwork.

Tasan · 10-10-2010, 07:17 PM

I second mp3tag. It lets you do several at one shot, so you can tag all from an album, or an artist, or a genre on that tag in one go. We just redid all of our collection to get it functioning right on our players and to get genres all in line to something sensible.

DaddyTorgo · 10-10-2010, 07:20 PM

mp3tag sounds familiar...feel like i've used it before...way back when.

problem is that my files have gone thru so many iterations since then they're all...messed up.

i know i'll have to go thru and manually adjust the tags on a bunch of them - that's a fact. a lot of them i don't know the album though - that's never been something that i've tracked. so i was figuring paying for some software that'd do the album+artwork once i tag everything nicely might make sense...

Mota · 10-11-2010, 02:14 PM

Yeah if it's not tagged properly I don't know how accurate those programs would be, you'd think they would have a hard time locating the artwork / details.

I had a program that would look at the Amazon website for cover art and automatically assign it, but it stopped working on my computer for some reason.

DaddyTorgo · 10-11-2010, 02:26 PM

Actually the ones that use gracenotes db do a good job even with improperly tagged stuff...since they use the audio-fingerprint of the song...

Easy Mac · 10-11-2010, 03:14 PM

windows media player is actually pretty decent at fixing tags. Just right click on a song (or select the entire album) and in the pop up is a prompt asking you to get meta data. It normally gives you a choice of albums, and you can search within that if your tags don't yield an immediate result.

I use the godfather, as it scrapes allmusic.com for moods and styles, which I use to create extremely specific playlists. It is less intuitive and quite time consuming though.

10-10-2010, 07:17 PM	#4
Tasan College Starter Join Date: Feb 2001 Location: Houston, or there about	I second mp3tag. It lets you do several at one shot, so you can tag all from an album, or an artist, or a genre on that tag in one go. We just redid all of our collection to get it functioning right on our players and to get genres all in line to something sensible. __________________ 2011 Golden Scribes winner for best Interactive Dynasty

10-10-2010, 07:20 PM	#5
DaddyTorgo Hall Of Famer Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Massachusetts	mp3tag sounds familiar...feel like i've used it before...way back when. problem is that my files have gone thru so many iterations since then they're all...messed up. i know i'll have to go thru and manually adjust the tags on a bunch of them - that's a fact. a lot of them i don't know the album though - that's never been something that i've tracked. so i was figuring paying for some software that'd do the album+artwork once i tag everything nicely might make sense... Last edited by DaddyTorgo : 10-10-2010 at 07:23 PM.

10-10-2010, 07:08 PM	#2
Mota College Benchwarmer Join Date: Jan 2001	I use MP3Tag to edit a lot of the files. The #1 priority is to have your files tagged properly, otherwise nothing else will work. You still have to find cover art if iTunes can't find it (it does find quite a bit of the commercial stuff). For anything that doesn't get populated automatically after you've tagged it properly, go to wikipedia, find the album you're looking for and "save image as" to your hard drive and then copy it as your cover art. I've found almost every missing cover that way.

10-10-2010, 07:09 PM	#3
Mota College Benchwarmer Join Date: Jan 2001	And yes it sucks, when I had to rebuild my library after a major crash I think I spent a full week ripping CD's, tagging and adding artwork.

10-11-2010, 02:14 PM	#6
Mota College Benchwarmer Join Date: Jan 2001	Yeah if it's not tagged properly I don't know how accurate those programs would be, you'd think they would have a hard time locating the artwork / details. I had a program that would look at the Amazon website for cover art and automatically assign it, but it stopped working on my computer for some reason.

10-11-2010, 02:26 PM	#7
DaddyTorgo Hall Of Famer Join Date: Oct 2002 Location: Massachusetts	Actually the ones that use gracenotes db do a good job even with improperly tagged stuff...since they use the audio-fingerprint of the song...

10-11-2010, 03:14 PM	#8
Easy Mac Registered User Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Here	windows media player is actually pretty decent at fixing tags. Just right click on a song (or select the entire album) and in the pop up is a prompt asking you to get meta data. It normally gives you a choice of albums, and you can search within that if your tags don't yield an immediate result. I use the godfather, as it scrapes allmusic.com for moods and styles, which I use to create extremely specific playlists. It is less intuitive and quite time consuming though.

Currently Active Users Viewing This Thread: 1 (0 members and 1 guests)